The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to implementations of the claimed inventions.
Organizations can run and customize existing database application programming interfaces (APIs) or build new custom database APIs based on particular business needs. Database triggers can be present within the APIs that are procedural codes that are executed in response to user interactions with a database. For example, a trigger can be a code that is executed before or after various types of database operations are executed such as: insert, update, delete, merge, undelete, etc. A trigger can be used to perform a number of automatic actions, such as cascading changes through related tables, enforcing column restrictions, comparing the results of data modifications, and maintaining the referential integrity of data across a database. The standard trigger procedure is to activate a trigger function in an API or provide a trigger code that is directed towards a specific entity.
Conventional “tightly-coupled triggers” require that specific entities (e.g., database object or table) be defined and applied to the trigger at the time the database is created and before the trigger program is compiled. These tightly-coupled triggers are inefficient for situations where the entity is not defined at the time the trigger code is developed. Metadata has been typically used to describe data, such as a format of the data, a type of the data, etc. Metadata can include information about various aspects of the data that it describes, including its structure, content, quality, context, origin, ownership and condition. However, techniques for defining metadata have generally exhibited various limitations. For example, the metadata itself has typically been incapable of being described by other metadata in a standard manner made available to third party developers of a platform maintaining the metadata.